This constant pressure from record companies to come up with a hit single or something like that, I find completely tiresome.

I don't think losing things - in my case, the use of my legs - really damages or hurts you. What hurts people a lot is taking humiliation. A lot of the wars going on right now in the Middle East aren't about poverty and exploitation. They're about humiliation. For a long time, the British and French have been humiliating the people of the Middle East, and encouraging people like Israel to do the same. Israel started out as a socialist state, but we always encouraged them to become rather racist and look down on the local inhabitants, which they now do. It's sad that's happened.

In the past, so many of my records, really, have been sketches for records that never really got made.

Im not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.

It's funny that Chairman Mao's great hero was Napoleon, because Napoleon started out as a revolutionary for the underdogs and then made himself an emperor. In fact, a lot of revolutionary leaders do that, and you think, "Well, that's spoiling your argument. What are you doing?" But on the other hand, the people themselves are enjoying trying out all these different ways to be. I hope that, like the Japanese, the Chinese hang on to their own traditions as well as try out Western ones. I hate it when people just lose so much confidence in who they are that they abandon their own culture.

I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.

I don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap.